by Mat Johnson
“There was an item listed today in a certain Hertfordshire house’s catalog as a ‘Negro Servant’s Memoir, dated 1837,’ I yelled after I heard the news. Garth was too chilled to even get my meaning. He didn’t understand, but I knew. Just that winter a well-known Africanist intellectual had found a place for himself on several of the major news outlets merely because of his purchase of a previously unknown slave narrative.
“This is the stuff academic names are built on, man. Careers. Careers are made on this kind of thing.” As we walked back to Garth’s car, images of a rogue intellectual career flashed before me, and I pictured a new life for myself, one of glamour and packed lecture halls. All the recent damage repaired.
“I like seeing the original site of the art. It’s like being able to climb in one,” Garth told me. I felt the same way, but it took me a moment to realize he was talking about the print he’d tucked in his coat like it was a sacred scroll.
When we arrived back at my rented house, the Ichabod Crane frame of Oliver Benjamin, book pimp, was on the porch, poking through the rotted mound of my literary history.
“How could you do this?” he said by way of hello. He had a moldy reproduction of the only issue of Fire! in his hand, holding the soggy thing as gently as if it were an original. I gave him a synopsis of the calamity and his response was “But still. You don’t know how to treat your things.”
He kept going. Pacing the travesty, listing off titles and cursing. He wouldn’t shut up. So he knew how to hurt me. I was so depressed at the end of his rant that I let him smoke in my living room, and even still Oliver spent the first minutes inside repeating a catalog of all that I had lost, specifically the volumes he’d found for me. Garth gave him coffee, and finally he relented. Oliver slurped and his Adam’s apple bobbed, and then he pulled his leather portfolio onto his lap and said, “This is going to cost you.” It wasn’t clear if he meant a lot of money or that he might not sell it to me at all, seeing that I was such a disastrous guardian of literary antiquities.
“I told you. I’m suing the damn college. I’m getting paid back for all those books. For what they did. They’re responsible.”
“Oh hell no. Don’t talk that lawsuit nonsense. I’m not waiting to get paid for some court to make a decision. This is going to cost you cash. Today.”
I agreed, got the money for him. Even untenured professors at private colleges make a decent salary, and you add up 10 percent of that each year for several years and you get a decent chunk. It was money I needed, but I needed the pain to stop more. When I came back in the room, Oliver had the white gloves on, had the thing on the coffee table. A rumpled pile of brown papers, folded up and ripped. I could see from the rough edges of the pages that the stock was brittle and disintegrating. Besides the fact that it was dry, it looked like it belonged out on my porch with the rest of the antiquarian cadavers. Oliver saw the disappointment in my face and the cash in my hand at the same time and found that a powerful combination.
“Okay, not mint condition here. Clearly not mint. And yes, there are some other issues. First, let’s get this out of the way: it’s not technically a slave narrative. I read through a bit of it. What I could. Early nineteenth century, but it’s not a slave narrative. The back is signed with the date and location. The guy’s born in a northern free state in the nineteenth century, so this is not a slave we’re dealing with here. Sorry. But regardless, it’s fiction. It’s got to be.”
Fiction! My mood improved. An African American work of fiction predating the Civil War was an equally impressive find. Depending on the quality of the story, it was possibly even a greater find than a memoir. Eager, palpitating, I took the box that contained the withering sheets into my hands.
“Well see, that’s the other thing. You might see different, that’s why I’m going to give you a good deal, but the manuscript is kind of, let’s say elusive. Nobody else today even wanted it. It was an estate sale, mostly art and furniture types bidding, but there’s other reasons. It’s more the notes for a book than a book itself. Parts of it are written like a journal, parts of it are just these disconnected scenes. There’s a lot of random scribbles in it too, and maps. But you don’t know; it could be useful. Look, we do this deal, I don’t want you to think I screwed you on this. I’m being up-front. So sure, the whole thing is a bit of a mess. But it could be your mess. Something to build a new collection around, maybe.”
Not letting my excitement completely abandon me and fully conscious that Mr. Benjamin was more of a literary hustler than a literary scholar, I lifted the brown and delicate linen cover. It was self-made and bound along its side in a messy hand stitch. On the page was the etching of a pale man, mulatto by feature and skin tone: his hair hinting at the slightest of kink, thin lips betrayed by a wide nose and the high West African cheekbones. The man was dressed in the frilled collar of the period. Drawn sitting at a desk. Beside him sat a periscope, a compass, and an open journal in which he was caught pleasantly getting his scribe on. The title read:
The True and Interesting Narrative of Dirk Peters.
Coloured Man. As Written by Himself.
Springfield, Illinois
1837
“See, that’s what I’m talking about. It’s a weird one,” Oliver continued, pushing his glasses back up his sharp nose and giving a good sniff as if that would jam them there. “I mean, what kind of black guy is named Dirk anyway?”
I knew immediately that it was true. That this was truly the autobiographical work of a living man. That Pym’s adventure must for the most part be true as well. Even before the days ahead when dates were researched, the censuses checked, the obscure biblical birth and property records investigated, I saw the text with its handwritten pages and loose script and knew that Dirk Peters had been a living man. I reeled, I careened, but I knew it was true, although the enormity of the revelation was almost beyond my ability to understand.
At the least, this was the greatest discovery in the brief history of American letters. That I was sure of. My boldest ambitions had instantly been met, and in the next instant surpassed beyond equal measure. Because if Dirk Peters existed, if this was a historic person who had walked this country just like me, what else did that mean in relation to Poe’s Narrative?
It meant, I discovered at my desk that night as I turned the work’s fragile pages, that there truly had been something living down in Antarctica. Something large and humanoid in nature. Maybe it was a lost strain of Neanderthal, or simply a variant of Homo sapiens that through location had managed to avoid modernity.§ And more important to me, it meant that Tsalal, the great undiscovered African Diasporan homeland, might still be out there, uncorrupted by Whiteness. That there was a group of our people who did achieve victory over slavery in all its forms, escaping completely from the progression of Westernization and colonization to form a society outside of time and history. And that I might find them.
* Reference: Buck Nigger archetype. Meaning: Any large, physically imposing Negro whose very presence demands that others get the “buck” out of his way.
† After noting that immigrant ethnic groups in the United States have traditionally used the word nigger to define themselves as white, the comedian Paul Mooney once said that he didn’t brush his teeth. He simply woke up every morning and said “nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger” until his smile was like so many pearls sparkling. Perhaps the Tsalalians’ black teeth were the first sign that the island was effectively removed from the Diasporan dialogue, the word clearly never having been uttered among them.
‡ This was really the way to deal with first contact with the Europeans of this era. The Hawaiians, they wish they’d thought of this. So do the Arawak of Jamaica, and the Mayans too. And the Ashanti. And the Iroquois also. Smile in their faces, be the harmless darky they think you are. And then, when they are fat and confident with their gunpowder and their omnipotence, kill every last one of them. Kill them before they go back to their overcrowded countries and tell the rest of
their people where to find your home and what to steal there.
§ While Poe’s narrative makes note of a figure “very far larger in its proportions than any dweller among men,” I have often wondered what Pym, presumably as short in stature as the majority of men of his period, would have made of an average National Basketball Association center.
THE dialogue that is African American literature really gets going with the slave narrative, the first book-length manuscript of which was published by Olaudah Equiano in 1789. Equiano’s slave narrative, with its swashbuckling seafaring adventure scenes, moves the reader with the story of the narrator’s own kidnapping, subjugation, and eventual escape from the slave system. Every word in Equiano’s narrative, every sentence, every page, is dedicated to one thing: convincing its reader of the moral necessity of abolitionism. And that’s the beginning of the primary conversation in African American literature, right there: the African descendant explaining to the European descendant about how white people’s actions are affecting the lives of black people.*
In the two centuries to follow, thousands more personal stories would be recorded, but in the next sixty years in particular, the slave narrative became a genre in itself. It is into this context that we must place The True and Interesting Narrative of Dirk Peters. That said, in those first days of plowing through the text, the differences between The True and Interesting Narrative of Dirk Peters and the major slave narratives of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries became fairly stark. For one, Dirk Peters was never a slave. Peters was instead the progeny of a free woman of European, African, and Native American heritage, and an Acadian trader.† The fact that Peters omits the African ingredient from his personal recipe, emphasizing the Native element instead, is altogether common and consistent with American Creoles of the period. Wishing not to be branded with the stigma and considerable social and legal limitations that accompanied a “black” classification, people of mixed heritage contended with the “one drop” rule of blackness by denying that one drop’s existence completely. While Native Americans were also a lower caste, the existence of diluted Native blood in most portions of the growing nation carried significantly fewer societal implications. Often, Native heritage was falsely claimed by African/European mulattoes attempting to “pass,” using indigenous ancestry as an excuse to explain away clearly non-European physical features. Similar claims have also been used by contemporary African Americans attempting to lessen the stigma of their personal “blackness.”‡
Structurally, The True and Interesting Narrative of Dirk Peters does not actually conform much to the novelistic prose form either. Like Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, Peters’s narrative is episodic, disjointed. The book begins with twelve pages on Dirk Peters’s isolated upbringing in rural Michigan. Similar to the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Peters’s tale focuses on his earliest memories of the woman who gave birth to him, the rumors about who his father probably was, as well as the agricultural, cultural, and socioeconomic breakdown of the area, and the narrator’s first recorded encounters with a racist society. From the unnamed mother we get the sole yet pivotal advice, “You got straight hair, you got light skin: if they don’t know you ain’t colored, don’t tell them!”
The next twenty-seven pages consist of Dirk Peters’s maiden voyage at sea. A fairly uneventful tale that spends the majority of its efforts describing in minute detail the duties of each member of the crew, and then more details of how each man failed to fully fulfill his responsibilities.§ It is revealed that, because of his small stature, he was assigned to understudy the main lookout. Apparently, up on his crow’s nest perch, Dirk Peters spent more time looking down than out at the sea around them, which seems plausible since the body of water was not an actual sea but Lake Michigan. In the following twenty-six-page section, Dirk Peters serves as a mate on a completely different boat, the Precipice, and he is somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico. How he managed to go from an inland freshwater ship in the North American Midwest to a merchant ship in Central America is completely unremarked upon.
Let me say here that it became evident to me that there were logical reasons why this text, The True and Interesting Narrative of Dirk Peters, while momentous in its historical significance, avoided publication and therefore its righteous place in history. I’ll begin with the obvious: the handwriting is downright fecal. Given the time period, when blotting quills and poor paper stock commonly obscured the scripted word, the hand of Dirk Peters still managed to be spectacularly illegible. It took me six eighteen-hour days to push through a first reading of the text. And I was trying really, really hard. This atrocious penmanship was allied with an equally poor grasp of grammar. When deciphering a blurred word, it helps to know what it should be. But Dirk himself doesn’t usually know what it should be. If it wasn’t for the revelation in the clearly printed title, I would have given up after the first page.‖ On the seventh day, I took a train into the city to check a ship’s log for the Precipice held at the New-York Historical Society. Taking the subway from Penn Station, unable to get a seat, I stood up with the firmly packed crowd and attempted awkwardly to record a thought on Peters’s saga as the local train swayed violently to and fro. The lights went out, and I kept writing. When the lights came back on a few seconds later, what I saw on the page stunned me. There I was eerily greeted with an exact duplication of Dirk Peters’s own hand. He was writing the manuscript at sea, I realized. Beneath the rocking deck, in little if any candlelight.
Another probable factor in the Peters manuscript’s obscurity was its timing. After a little old white lady published her lengthy melodrama about the evils of slavery in the American South in 1838, Uncle Tom’s Cabin changed the dialogue of African American literature dramatically. Overnight, African American autobiographical storytelling became antiquated, and fiction, with its ability to directly manipulate the emotions of the white masses, proved a far more effective political tool. While the majority of Dirk Peters’s manuscript was written before 1837, for a variety of reasons it was not quite ready for publication then, and truly never was.
While I have said that the narrative of Dirk Peters, much like Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, is episodic, let me further state that in the majority of other ways their structures are dissimilar. Poe’s Pym is serialized, the product of a magazinist whose imagination constructed narratives in fifteen-page, stand-alone segments. Dirk Peters’s chapters are crude and roughly structured. To be specific, Peters barely even has prose, just handwritten notes, brown and crisp from time, hand-sewn together haphazardly by thick thread (some of which appears to be fishing line). Each bound section is an individual tirade or description of events complete without reference to any larger context of the man’s life. One minute he’s on one ship. The next he’s on another boat yammering about a completely new set of mundane events. The next he’s at shore complaining about the price of the produce and prostitutes. If it wasn’t for the later entries, where Peters actively describes trying to sell his work, it would be logical to conclude that the collection was not intended for publication. What truly distinguishes The True and Interesting Narrative of Dirk Peters from the rest of the pantheon is that Dirk Peters was never a writer. This was a work constructed by a man without talent for structure. Or for character. Or poetry.
That first week of studying the manuscript, I felt drunk. When I wasn’t researching, I actually got drunk, so I could sustain the sensation. Garth didn’t fully understand what was going on, but he knew I was instantly overflowing with joy, and he was cool with that. We put off leaving for Detroit longer, and that meant he got to hike back to his painting site every sunset and pretend to climb into a better world, so we both were happy.
It took ten days to get verification on the age of the manuscript based on a sample of its ink and paper I sent to a grad school connection now working at the Smithsonian, and in that regard it was either an unlikely masterpiece of forgery or an actual product of the nineteenth ce
ntury. This was all good, but what I really wanted to verify was whether or not it was true. Did this Dirk Peters really live and work among us? In the months ahead, I planned to continue my thorough and academic inquiry. In my more ambitious waves, I imagined an expedition to Antarctica. I had a cousin who might offer insight, someone I knew only from family rumors and newspaper clippings, who’d done oceanic salvage in the area, and for a romantic afternoon I hunted him down and left messages, trying to get him to contact me. The next day, Garth promised to drive me down to the National Archives in Washington, D.C., as long as we detoured on a Karvel spotting mission to find the site of a monstrosity titled Cabana de la Chesapeake.
It was going on two in the morning. I was spent physically and mentally. The limits of my official online database searching had for the day been exhausted, there was no historical library catalog left that I could think of to unravel the mystery of Dirk Peters. So I Googled him.
There are a multitude of Dirk Peterses in the world, it turned out, and most of them had nothing to do with books. When I tried adding the keyword “Pym” to the search, I was drowning in information on Poe’s fictional account. Largely out of curiosity, I tried an image search for the name instead. The result: “Dirk Peters” was fairly common in the planet’s paler regions, as many a white Dirk Peters smiled for the camera in various snapshots. I was pushing absently through pages of these images in the hope of seeing perhaps a lithograph of Peters’s fictionalized portrait when a wholly inconsistent image struck me. Below that same Anglophonic name was the head shot of a woman, a black woman, probably in her sixties. It was a glamour shot, taken through the forced dreaminess of a Vaselined lens. Her chin rested on her hands, and one of those hands held a large red rose, like it was a singles ad. The entire photo was no bigger than my thumbnail, and even from that I could tell that flower was plastic. Clicking the link below took me to the obviously amateurish website of the woman in the picture, a self-proclaimed “Singer, Actor, Poet, Novelist, Dancer, Actress and Noted Psychic Person,” who went by the name Mahalia Mathis. By this point I was just browsing for laughs. I stopped laughing when I came to a page titled “Genealogy.” And there, at the top of a long and haggard willow of a family tree, was a patriarch who held the same name as the one I had been searching for, next to a tag that read “Crow Indian, Michigan.”
